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No More Heroes 3

No More Heroes 3

Suda51 and Travis Touchdown are back to the Santa Destroy of yesteryear, but they're bringing some of the most stylish combat and designs with them.

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No More Heroes 3

Let me start by getting to what in my opinion is the most controversial point here first and foremost: No More Heroes 3 is the combination of satisfying combat, insane situations, arcade flavour, varied art, and quirky characters fans have come to expect, but the way it's structured means that you won't fight your way through your typical slash 'em up levels so to speak. Instead, it takes the focus back to the open map of Santa Destroy to present you with a good bunch of activities and mini-games, whereas combats come mostly in the form of challenges or direct boss fights. I spent my first five hours or so of playtime pondering whether this was a good design decision or bad, but to answer that one has to assess how much fun lies in every other aspect of the game.

With that caveat out of the way, let's take a deeper look at the third entry to what, fourteen and eleven years ago respectively, became the most irreverent, punk-filled releases on the Wii. Suda51 and the team at Grasshopper Manufacture pay good tribute to those originals and also take a bunch of notes from the recent Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes spinoff. The game shows its personality from the get go, with the type of sequences, introductions, and even player-driven sections you don't normally find in any other series. It manages to feel uniquely fun with the love for both retro gaming, anime superheroes, and NMH's own legacy.

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Combat areas look fine and perform good.
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And before I get into the combat itself, let me recognise that the use of art and imagery got me here. It's not that I didn't see it coming given GhM's previous efforts or the footage of this game shown so far, but I just really fall for the way they can transition from the game's UE-ish graphics to a cartoon movie, to beautiful illustrations, to a sudden movie-like credits roll, to Windows 3.11 menus and pixel art dialogues, to then a painted or retouched version of something else. The whole art work goes hand in hand with the spectacular, gory encounters, and also tries hard to compensate for the otherwise poorly-looking open world sections.

The combat itself is a pleasure, like the most refined version of the series' systems for its best incarnation yet. Even though I missed the "high/low stance" options at first, it's still varied and powerful, and it quickly provides you with a range of badass moves. No matter if you opt for motion controls (a rewarding physical experience) or buttons-based alternative (works nicely and this game lends itself to brief handheld bursts given its structure), your beam katana, wrestling moves, and Death Glove specials will swiftly fill the screen with blood and pixels.

As usual, it's a matter of timing your combos, knowing when to dodge (and when to stop smashing the buttons) and using resources such as katana battery, consumables (sushi basically) and the special powers wisely. However, there's some added RPG progression and strategy to it, and you'll want to level up Travis's different stats, and to customise his buffs by means of the Death Glove chips you craft with gathered resources.

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Get ready with the Power Up Machine, by creating custom chips, and by ordering some sushi.
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All this makes for some really intense combat, and some enemies will put your skill to the test. And besides the spectacular finishers, another highlight is when Travis goes "Henshin!" for full armor form, which basically means you manoeuvre an OP mecha to either insta-kill the alien grunts on the ground or to face a StarFox-like enemy in space. Again, some good thought and effort has been put here to break the pace with different, enjoyable arcade sections.

The main problem, then, is that you might feel like you're not putting those amazing combat techniques to their best use. The main bosses -the ranked assassins of the galactic UAA plus some surprises- mean of course the best fights in the game, with interesting level design, dirty tricks, and even puzzle elements or crazy changes of camera angle to make the challenge harder, but other than making the story, and your rank climbing, progress, they're the peak to nothing, as there was little to no previous building up to them.

It's not that the "Designated Matches" you complete in order to enrol in the next Ranking Battle aren't fun, as some of them introduce amazing enemy designs or some serious challenge that will make you appreciate the cool retry system they've come up with. Nor that the wave-based Defense Missions are useless, but both can feel short and repetitive with time, and the fact that they're spread around the map, instead of getting in your way before the boss, make the main encounters isolated and somewhat unrelated, and leave you wanting for more action. NMH and Desperate Struggle's slash 'em up levels weren't a master class in design either, but at least they improved the continuity.

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There are 100 shirts to collect with exclusive designs. The player status shows how much you can customise.

Because elsewhere the side missions and activities are okay. Some are really fun actually (trash collection sees you suplexing alligators, and mowing the lawn could get its own simul~ oh wait), but others are just too simple or outdated, even if their concept itself is cool (such as fire-cannoning those alligators).

And this takes us to Santa Destroy itself, where all those icons for events are placed. If the Wii original was a parody of the GTAs of the 2000's, this seems like a weird way to honour that first iteration. It looks barren, strikingly similar to the Wii's, as if they wanted it to look as badly as you recall. The open area also performs poorly, especially on handheld, which makes the treks to find collectibles, like Jeane's lost kittens or scorpions for a ramen, a chore. I appreciate the thematic islands (gotta love the Call of Duty parody) and I understand that this is no proper open world city, but just an expanded hub, but it's just a big contrast to the combat and an aspect that makes me miss regular levels.

And then combat and personality strike back to make you have another good time, and that's the dynamic here more or less. Even if the script feels a bit less brilliant, some of the dialogue and reflections remain thought-provoking, and I enjoyed the discussions about Takashi Miike's work, the conversations between Jess-Baptiste VI and the other assassins, and some of the social criticism, including a few genius references and some "Kill the Past" lore.

So all in all you'll find fun within story cutscenes, quirky situations and, above all, many of the combat encounters, same as you'll probably enjoy the varied alien designs and the amazing use of art and music. However, the experience to me wasn't as tight as the previous games, and I'd rather fight than walk through Santa Destroy's streets. That being said, No More Heroes 3 works better than ever as a few-minute bursts game, and it always remains peculiar, retro, and bold, a must-have for fans.

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The open world doesn't look as good as combat, especially on handheld.
No More Heroes 3
07 Gamereactor UK
7 / 10
+
Beautiful, innovative use of art and music. Best combat in the series. Great alien designs. Some crazy boss fights. Hilarious moments. Surprises for fans.
-
Santa Destroy isn't that fun. Enemy challenges can get repetitive. Little build-up to bosses. Slightly glitchy, too much loading.
overall score
is our network score. What's yours? The network score is the average of every country's score

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No More Heroes 3

REVIEW. Written by David Caballero

Suda51 and Travis Touchdown are back to the Santa Destroy of yesteryear, but they're bringing some of the most stylish combat and designs with them.



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